Are Labels Necessary for Neural Architecture Search?

Chenxi Liu, Piotr Dollár, Kaiming He, Ross Girshick, Alan Yuille, Saining Xie Spotlight @ECCV 2020 (Short Summary)

Current Universe

Parallel Universe

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Designing neural architectures

( , 6) ( , ship) ( , panda)❌ ❌ ❌

What neural architectures will we find? Will they look similar to those on the left? Will they work as well as those on the left?

Architecture rankings produced with and without labels are highly correlated, across: • 3 unsupervised tasks • 2 datasets • 2 search spaces

3

Sample-based experiments

Status quoOurs

4

Search-based experiments

Architectures searched without labels are highly competitive, across: • 3 unsupervised search tasks • 3 search datasets • 2 supervised evaluation tasks • 2 evaluation datasets

Status quo Ours

4

Search-based experiments

Architectures searched without labels are highly competitive, across: • 3 unsupervised search tasks • 3 search datasets • 2 supervised evaluation tasks • 2 evaluation datasets

To perform NAS successfully, labels are not necessary

Thank you!